by David Ellis
Joey eagerly complied and covertly recorded four conversations with Hector before Adalbert Wozniak’s murder in May. At that point, the feds made the call that they couldn’t continue to lie low and risk more bloodshed, so they closed in, arresting eleven gang members, fourteen co-conspirators, and the illustrious Senator Almundo.
“Joey’s not the problem,” Paul argued. “He’s a scumbag, but that doesn’t change what’s on the tapes. Hector still said what he said.”
Hector’s words on the tapes were pretty damning, instructing his chief of staff, Espinoza, to continue working with the Columbus Street Cannibals and their extortion scheme. We didn’t have much to refute it, other than to argue that Joey was really calling the shots, and Hector was an absent-minded leader who didn’t sweat the details. That wasn’t the easiest sell, however, when he was on tape telling Joey to keep doing what he was doing with the street gang.
“So find a way to refute it,” Lightner said.
“Oh. Thanks, Joel.” Paul turned to me. “You get that, Jason? Lightner says we should find a way to refute it. You can’t put a price on those pearls of wisdom.”
Paul and Lightner went back to the eighties, during a mass murder in the south suburbs, when Paul was the prosecutor and Joel the cop. Lightner left the job fifteen years ago and opened a private investigation agency that has benefited mightily from its association with this law firm.
“Jason,” Lightner said to me, “you’re new, so you may not know—when Paul gets frustrated, he takes it out on poor underlings like me. What he really means is he appreciates my contribution to this case. Also, I don’t know if he told you yet, but as a condition of working on this case, you have to name your child after Paul.”
“Jason’s child is going to be a girl, Lightner, which you would know if you didn’t start drinking before noon every day,” Paul replied.
“Okay, Paulina, then. Paulina Kolarich.”
This usually happened at the end of the workday, these two getting on each other before they went out for steaks and martinis that night. They were both bachelors, Paul once-divorced and Lightner twice. They could be pretty amusing when they got going. Their deliveries were so dry that it still took me an extra moment to separate sarcasm from sincerity.
“And I don’t start drinking until three o’clock, at the earliest,” Lightner protested.
I felt something pull at me, a clearing of some clouds in my head. Maybe . . .
“What kind of a name is Kolarich, anyway?”
Could that work? Was it that simple . . . ?
“He’s in a state of shock,” Lightner went on. “He’s so mesmerized by your intelligence, Riley, that he can’t speak. You’re gonna have a long career at this place, Jason. Just repeat after me: Paul, you’re so brilliant. Paul, you’re so brilliant.”
I looked at Lightner, then at Paul. Riley nodded at me out of curiosity.
I cleared my throat and gave it one more thought.
“Hang on,” Lightner said. “I think he’s about to say something.”
“Yeah, I am,” I said. “I think I know how to defend this case.”
4
AS THE SECOND CHAIR ON THE ALMUNDO DEFENSE team, I had to serve dual roles. I had to be prepared for my portion of the trial work, less than Paul’s but still significant. Then I had to oversee the other lawyers on Team Almundo—six lawyers, six paralegals, and four private investigators—ensuring that all operations were humming along in synch. We had meetings twice daily, first in the morning and then at five o’clock, confirming that the documents had been cross-referenced accurately in the database; that all motions in limine had been drafted; that drafts of direct and cross-examinations had been prepared. We were two weeks out from trial now, and all those assignments that looked like we had plenty of time to finish suddenly seemed desperately incapable of timely completion.
My own personal to-do list was moving quite nicely. I had tasks scribbled on pieces of paper plastered haphazardly on my wall and most of them had been completed. But one prominent item remained: Ernesto Ramirez. Joel Lightner had once again labeled it a lost cause—“Either he doesn’t know anything or he does, but he won’t tell you; a dead end either way”—but that only motivated me more. I was sure I saw something in his face, and I let my imagination take me to places where his revelation was a game-changer at trial, a Perry Mason moment. If everyone else on Team Almundo doubted me, so much the better; the glory would belong only to me.
“How we doing?” I spoke into my cell phone.
“It’s going to be soon,” Talia said.
“Wishful thinking.”
“When are you coming home?”
“One thing I gotta do first.”
My one thing was Ernesto Ramirez. I’d made Lightner assign someone to give me a full workup on the guy in case I wanted to pursue him further. Ernesto Javier Ramirez, former member of the Latin Lords street gang; working for a nonprofit off-the-streets program called La Otra Familia that tried to pull kids out of gangs; wife Esmeralda and two kids, ages six and nine. He pumped iron at the YMCA three times a week. He had dinner with his mother once a week. He took a shop class every Tuesday. Otherwise, he went to work and spent time with his family.
Most important, he still had ties to the Latin Lords, which was promising because that gave him access to on-the-ground information about all sorts of criminal activity should he desire it. I was working on the assumption that if he knew something about Wozniak’s murder, the information might well have come from the Lords—and play that out another step and maybe it was the Lords, not the Columbus Street Cannibals, who killed Wozniak. A wild thought, maybe, but imagine the bombshell at Hector’s trial: The government got the wrong street gang. It would blow a hole in a big part of their case, the Wozniak murder. It wouldn’t exonerate Hector from the part about the street shakedown, but once we knocked out one leg, that other limb would look mighty shaky.
His branch of the YMCA was over in the Liberty Park neighborhood, close to his office and his home. I drove there. The sun had fallen behind the buildings on the city’s southwest side but it was not yet dusk, casting a dull glow over the broken streets and rundown shops—check-cashing facilities, liquor stores with chains over their windows, a bakery, and a couple of carnicerías. I didn’t know this neighborhood well. I grew up only a few miles to the south and east, in Leland Park, but it might as well have been a thousand miles away. Back then, the white Catholics didn’t cross the unofficial borders, and nobody else crossed theirs unless they wanted a beating.
I turned onto Knapp Avenue, which for wealthy whites served as nothing more than a major westbound artery to the interstate highway. The area was teeming with pedestrians, mostly brown faces, some kids darting suicidally between cars across the avenue like a real-time urban video game.
I didn’t have a membership to the Y and I didn’t know what I’d be able to manage at the front desk. But it couldn’t hurt to try. A pleasant young woman told me I could have a one-time pass as a tryout. I gave her my driver’s license so she could be sure I wasn’t living off of free passes, and once she typed in my name and confirmed I was a first-timer, she handed me a green ticket and a couple of towels. If she’d noticed that I had no gym bag or any other evidence of workout gear, she didn’t say so.
I went downstairs to the workout facility and found Ernesto Ramirez pretty easily. There were only five people pumping iron. He was wearing baggy shorts and a gray tank top stained with his sweat. He was bench-pressing two plates on each side of the bar—two hundred twenty-five pounds. The bar is forty-five and each plate is forty-five. A standard test in the NFL draft is bench presses of this weight, with your hands no wider than your shoulders, emulating a lineman’s shiver block. Or at least it was a standard test when I was playing college ball. I managed eleven presses my freshman year. I didn’t make it to the end of my sophomore year, having settled a disagreement with one of our team captains by breaking his jaw and ending my football career.
> Ernesto managed one shaky press, with his arms spread wide and his back arched for additional leverage. Not bad for a little guy in his early thirties. Not bad for anybody.
His eyes swept past mine but quickly returned. I was a white guy in a suit, not exactly fitting in, and then his eyes registered that I was a white guy in a suit whom he knew. It probably spooked him a little that I knew where to find him. I’d obviously done my homework. But I didn’t want to catch him at home, where he could close a door in my face, and the time for diplomacy had come and gone.
He picked the towel up off the weight bench and wiped his face. He said something in Spanish to the guy spotting him, who was just as short as him but much stockier.
“I told you,” he said before he’d even reached me, “that I got nothing to say to you.”
“You have something to say to me. You just don’t want to say it.”
Fresh sweat broke on his forehead. He wiped at it with his hand towel. “Either way,” he said, “I’m not talking to you anymore. Don’t contact me. Leave me alone.”
“Whoever killed Bert Wozniak is going to walk from it,” I said. “You okay with that?”
“Not my problem.”
“Your whole life is worrying about other people’s problems.”
“Well, not this one.”
“You stay quiet, everyone blames your friend, Eddie Vargas. That okay with you?”
“Now you got me worrying about a dead man’s problems.”
I nodded slowly, watching him. He looked over his shoulder. All four of the other weightlifters, especially his spotter, were watching me. Ernesto was scared. I could read it all over him. And that was meaningful. Ernesto was clearly a proud man. Nobody who puts up vanity reps at a weight bench is anything but proud. You work out, at his age, to stay in shape. You choose weights that you can press eight, ten times. You don’t go for your max weight unless you take some pride in how much you can press. Nothing wrong with that, but it meant he wouldn’t want to show anyone his fear, and he wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding it right now.
“I can protect you,” I said.
“Oh?” He laughed at me without humor. “Who you gonna protect me from?”
“Whoever.”
His eyes narrowed. “You know anything at all about my world?”
“Then tell me confidentially. I won’t disclose you as a source. Give me a name—give me something—and I’ll take it from there. Nobody will ever know.”
He was quiet for a long moment. I couldn’t tell if he was considering my proposal or considering the best way to blow me off. Finally, he squared up and spoke to me in what he intended to be a conclusive statement on the matter.
“They’ll know,” he said. “Now good-bye.”
I called after him, my heartbeat escalating. “Who’s they?”
“Excuse me,” said some muscle-bound guy wearing a Y t-shirt that was two sizes too small. “If you’re not here to check out the facility, we need to ask you to leave.”
“Who’s they, Ernesto?” I tried again, speaking to his back as he returned to the bench press.
“Sir, c’mon, now.”
I worked my arm out of his grip. But there was no sense making a scene.
They’ll know, he’d said.
There was something there. I knew it.
My cell phone rang. I fumbled with it, revealing some nerves. I might actually be onto something big here.
The caller ID said the call was coming from home.
“My water broke,” said Talia.
5
ASSISTANT U.S. ATTORNEY CHRISTOPHER MOODY, lead prosecutor in United States v. Almundo, stood at the prosecution table, leafing through some papers. He had about five years on me—roughly forty—and his tightly cropped reddish blond hair and boyish features struggled against the sober demeanor required of any federal prosecutor. He had the look of someone who had just finished a stressful assignment.
In fact, the government was all but done with their case now. They’d put on more than thirty witnesses. Eleven members of the Columbus Street Cannibals, each of whom had pleaded guilty, had testified to shaking down local businessmen. Nine intermediaries, “straw” contributors who pocketed the extorted cash and then wrote a check in the same amount (minus a small fee for their troubles) to Citizens for Almundo, all had taken pleas and testified as well. There was no doubt about the extortion; the defense, in fact, had agreed to stipulate to it, but the federal government, in its typical flair for overkill, had scorched every last plot of earth, calling many of the shopkeepers as well and providing all kinds of colorful, fancy charts and PowerPoint presentations matching up the extortion payments to contributions to Hector’s campaign fund.
As for the Wozniak murder, the government showed that Wozniak refused to pay the street tax and introduced plenty of forensic evidence linking the fine young Cannibal, Eddie Vargas, to his murder.
But the government had a problem. For all this evidence, none of the witnesses could point the finger at Senator Almundo himself. None of those witnesses would testify that they ever spoke to Hector. And it wasn’t a crime to accept a contribution that was the product of extortion unless you knew the source of the money was illegal. If we could detach Hector from this criminal enterprise, he would walk free.
Enter Hector’s chief of staff, Joey Espinoza, the sole witness who could tie Hector to all of this, and who wore a wire to help the government do so. A polished, well-groomed man in his early forties, Joey Espinoza had just spent the last three days testifying that the entire neighborhood shakedown was orchestrated by his boss, the senator, from the comfort of his district office.
Finally, after conferring with his fellow assistants—other white Irishmen—Christopher Moody unbuttoned his blue suit jacket, signaling he was about to take his seat. I felt the familiar adrenaline spike.
“Thank you, Mr. Espinoza,” Moody said. “The United States has no further questions, Your Honor.”
“Cross-examination?” asked the judge, looking at Paul Riley, not me.
I felt the courtroom brim with fresh energy as the prosecution passed the witness to the defense. Espinoza had been on the stand for the government for three full days, so the buzz had subsided. But now the defense was going to get its shot, and expectations were high. We had to be aware of that from the outset. After Espinoza’s testimony, the jury would be expecting us to put a big hole in his testimony, or Hector Almundo would be convicted.
Paul Riley gave a very curt nod in my direction, a vote of confidence. I rose from my seat and felt a hushed surprise behind me. I assumed almost every spectator had anticipated that Paul, a celebrated lawyer, would handle the cross-examination of this witness. I’d been surprised myself when Paul tapped me. It certainly wasn’t charity on his part. There was no way that Paul would let me cut my teeth in a situation where the stakes were so high. Something had told him that I was the better choice. I think he wanted to stay “clean,” so to speak, for the closing argument. He wanted to remain the good guy, the earnest advocate, and not the one who tore a hole in the prosecution’s chief witness.
In any event, all that mattered now was that I took this witness down.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Espinoza. My name is Jason Kolarich.”
“Good afternoon,” said Espinoza.
The witness was inherently unlikeable: dressed too immaculately, bountiful dark hair styled just so, overly impressed with his careful enunciation—slick was my preferred term.
“If Senator Almundo had been elected attorney general, he would’ve had to resign his state senate seat mid-term, isn’t that true? He’d have two years left on his four-year term.”
“Yes, of course,” said the witness.
“And you wanted to be appointed to fill that vacancy.”
The witness angled his head ever so slightly.
My eyes moved to Chris Moody, who was scribbling a note. This would be a surprise to Moody, I assumed. Espinoza had said nothing of this in the d
irect examination, and he probably hadn’t volunteered this information to the feds. Espinoza had cast himself as the faithful aide, the loyal servant acting at the behest of his master. The obvious point I wanted to make was that Espinoza had an independent motivation to engage in the extortion plot; Hector’s move up the ladder would leave a rung open for Joey. And given that Espinoza probably hadn’t shared this information with the prosecutors, they hadn’t had the chance to prepare him for this line of inquiry.
“I don’t know about that,” said the witness.
“Well—” I looked at my client, Senator Hector Almundo, then back at Espinoza. “Didn’t you tell Senator Almundo that you’d want to be appointed to his seat? That you wanted to be the next senator from the thirteenth district?”
Espinoza restrained himself from looking in the senator’s direction. He took the whole thing like it was amusing. “I might have expected to serve as his chief of staff at the attorney general’s office, but senator? I don’t know about that.”
“That’s not what I asked you, sir.” Always a favorite line of a defense attorney—pointing out a witness’s evasion. It puts a small dent in his credibility and also highlights the importance of the question. “Did you not tell Senator Almundo that this is exactly what you wanted? To take his place in the senate?”
The witness, I thought, was calculating. Would Senator Almundo take the stand and testify to such a conversation? Had anyone else heard him utter this desire?
“Mr. Kolarich, the senator and I spent a great deal of time together. Often sixteen-hour days. Many things came up from time to time. If you are asking, did we ever discuss my future, the answer is probably yes.”
This was going well. The witness was giving a political answer, but this wasn’t a press conference. A chance for another indentation in his façade of credibility. If a witness is a brand-new car on direct examination, you want him to look he was in a head-on collision by the time you’re done crossing him.
